Mixing two collectables!

One of the frissons of collecting and buying from auction is that you are never quite sure of what you're going to end up with! (shades of Forrest Gump sneaking in to this one!). 

I have a little habit of buying 'interesting looking lots on spec' from auction, there may be something good in the box - or sadly more often I just become a recepticle for other peoples waste! You know how it goes, you're searching through online lots and you see catalogued a 'box of miscellaneous automobilia' for a starting bid of £5! You can't quite see everything that's included but it looks interesting.....30 minutes later you are the proud new owner of a box of crap. (For £50 - How did that happen???). A round trip of 200 miles and you finally have the chance to go through your 'lucky dip box', yep, there's another reproduction poster, a dodgy reprint of a Gordon Crosby, various manky stickers, an old road map...but hang on a minute - what's this! oooh - not seen this before a sheet of stamps!!!??? And this is what happened last month! 

Tucked away in an old envelope I found a full unissued sheet of Monaco/Bugatti postage stamps, interesting and clearly tucked away and forgotten - but still in pristine condition!

Very nice, but completely inpracticle - what to do with them? Clearly these need to be seen and displayed! One of the great parts of owning a gallery, with access to a team of experts means that we can take a nice but seemingly useless item and turn it into a work of 'art' which is the promise that this sheet offered.

But first we had to do the Who,what, when, why exercise! (research!).For this item the obvious was easy - They are postage stamps for the principality, produced in 1966 - helpfully 'Monaco mail' had date stamped the sheet as produced 7th November 1966, although the actual 'issue' was 1967. This is relevant because 1967 was the 25th running of the Grand Prix - I know the dates don't add up, but if we take out the war years, 1967 was actually the 25th time the race had been run, so there we have it, these stamps were produced to commemorate the anniversary. 

There was actually a set of 5 stamps.

Personally I feel that the Bugatti should have been the highest value! but on the plus side it meant that a sheet of stamps were affordable and I guess this is why this one is still around today as it was probably the cheapest sheet to buy at the time!

So, off it went to the framing dept. and this is what we ended up with.

Damn, now we deal in stamps too!